A Fragment of Fear

She never let go of it.

Attached to the lifebelt was a bill.

When you are floundering in deep waters and in peril of drowning you don’t think about bills. Above all you don’t think of Lucy Dawson’s kind of bill.

Lucy Dawson’s war of revenge against the criminal world was a long war, the more merciless because her victims were the ones who might have been salvaged, indeed were salvaged. But in her dark distorted mind there was no element of discrimination.

So, as I walked, I imagined her.

The long wait did not matter for her, for all the time she was, as it were, licking her chops before the meal. Anticipation can give as much if not more pleasure than realisation. When the fruit was ripe, she plucked it.

I wondered in what way the blackmail approach was made. Perhaps in a letter, at first, to prepare the ground: “Being acquainted, as by experience you undoubtedly are, with the type of work in which I am interested, it has been suggested to me that you will probably be willing to subscribe to our funds. I would not, of course, approach you in this way if I did not think that you were sympathetic to our aims. Perhaps I might telephone you one day, or we might meet, in order to decide upon the amount which you will, I feel certain, wish to give annually to such a deserving cause.”

Nothing threatening.

Merely the implied certainty that there would be no refusal.

How much did she take? Five, ten, twenty per cent of their salaries? Was it all in cash, or was it in cash and kind? Did Bardoni pay her entire hotel bill, when she stayed there under the fiction that she liked to pay the manager direct? Did the others do likewise? What of Miss Brett and the Bower Hotel? Did she pay Miss Brett a certain sum, and order that unattractive woman to make up the difference?

What of Mrs. Gray? No distorted mind there. Just money. What was her cut?

The questions raced through my mind, and although I could not expect to find an answer to these particular ones, I was convinced that I was on the right track.

I thought I had the answer to the whole thing: Mrs. Dawson had been running a long-term blackmail racket, and somebody had revolted at last, and killed her at Pompeii.

I thought it was as simple as that.

By the time I had arrived back at the flat I was still sure I was right. As a small check, I telephoned the International Seamen’s Widows’ and Orphans’ Fund, on whose behalf she wrote so many letters, according to what Mrs. Dacey had told me at the Bower Hotel.

I was not surprised to learn they had never heard of her. She was too busy, I thought, writing to her victims, to bother about seamen’s widows and orphans.

But the centre core of the problem, the big, menacing question mark still remained unsolved.

I understood the minor obstructions I had encountered, the attempts to dissuade me from my investigations made by Bardoni. Poor old Bardoni, I thought, and almost softened towards him in spite of his eyes hacked out of chunks of oak. What crime had he committed in his youth? What toll did he pay to Mrs. Dawson, how long had it been going on? Had she known that Juliet was his daughter when Stanley and Elaine Bristow visited his hotel to carry out their warped experiment?

I could understand his fears all right. I could understand those of the unloveable Constance Brett, whose whole life was bound up in her job at the Bower Hotel.

Mrs. Gray was different. How much did she know of the victims, and was she planning to take over the racket?

It was at this point that my thinking faltered.

These people were tiddlers, swimming around fearful and wide-eyed, afraid of anything which might disturb the calm patch of water they had reached after much toil and trouble. I recalled the thoughts I had had in the taxi as I hastened to interview Colonel Pearson.

So who was the Big Cat, the powerful one, the one with power, riches and organisational ability, the one who was cool and cautious, who preferred to gain his ends by fear, if he could, rather than risk a killing, but who, nevertheless, had certainly killed poor Bunface?

I am sometimes a slow thinker; and then again, sometimes my thoughts can become so complicated and involved that I cannot see the obvious, even when it is almost crying out to be recognised.

But now, with a jolt, I saw that which should have been long since apparent to me.

Hitherto, I had linked the petty obstructions of Bardoni and Constance Brett with the campaign against me, regarding them as stemming from the same motives, lumping the Big Fish with the tiddlers.

Now I began to see the truth, or at least part of it.

The tiddlers were afraid for themselves.

The Big Cat, the Great Predator, was afraid for the organisation.

Lucy Dawson’s racket had been taken over. The motive for her murder was not that of a blackmail victim who had reached the end of his tether.

The motive was money.

A going concern.

Vast profit and no capital risks.

No risks of any kind, if the cards were played right.

A gangster take-over, possibly originating in Italy, possibly not. I wondered whether they had offered her a cut or a partnership.

But they had misjudged her. Knowing nothing of her sad past, having no inkling of the secret, dark corners of a tragic, inhibited, and unforgiving soul, they could not see that to take this thing from her would be like removing the mainspring from a clock.

The last rendezvous at Pompeii had been the final attempt.

I could imagine her saying, in effect, “Over my dead body.”

And so it was. So it was, indeed.

I was very delighted and relieved by this theory, as I opened the street door leading to my flat. The dominating emotion was relief.

Some things, some tricks they had played, still baffled me, but I no longer had any lingering doubts at all about my mental stability. Nor, frankly, had I much fear. I was just faced with a bunch of crooks.

I could handle a bunch of crooks.

Thus I let myself in, overwhelmed by my own brilliance, dazzled by my own acumen, and infinitely glad that whatever anybody else thought I had discovered the key to the current problem.

There proved to be a grain of truth in my new theory. A very small grain.

Otherwise it was totally wrong, like all my thoughts and actions in this calamitous affair.

Still, there you are, as dapper Colonel Pearson would have said. You can only do your best.

You can only bumble along the jungle-skirted paths, and, if the crackle of twigs alarms you, you can say it is only a wild pig, not exactly harmless, but capable of being repulsed.

If you hear the slither of bodies, and the sound continues with you, then of course it is a different matter. But you can only hitch your spear forward and hope for the best. You can console yourself with the thought that more peasants get through than not.

It can, however, be fatal, even in this modern day and age, not to keep your eyes open and your spear ready, and to think that it is always the other peasant who is clawed down.

Mind you, it probably always will be the other peasant, until one day the other peasant is you.

CHAPTER 10

So I let myself in, and on the mat inside the door was another buff envelope, which for a second I thought was a bill from my garage; but it was the middle of the month, not the beginning, and I suppose I realised as I stooped down to pick it up that it was another note. I opened it there and then.